He aims to make it as costly to shed a lover as a spouse
Gazing down from the ceiling of the art-and antique-filled office in Los Angeles’ Century City is an oversized, backlighted color transparency of a Botticelli Venus. Sitting below the goddess of love in a thronelike chair, once owned by Rudolph Valentino, is Marvin Mitchelson, a divorce lawyer who has made millions off love gone wrong in Hollywood. Since the mid-1960s, Mitchelson, 50, has piled up a long list of financially rewarding victories in celebrity divorce battles, sometimes representing big-name clients (Rhonda Fleming, Connie Stevens, Red Buttons) but more often fighting for the showfolks’ spouses. Among them: the wives of Rod Steiger, Alan Jay Lerner, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Richard Harris and Tony Curtis, who has had the misfortune of losing child-custody cases to not one but two Mitchelson-represented spouses.
Next week a Los Angeles jury will begin hearing another Mitchelson case: the long pending “divorce” suit against Actor Lee Marvin by his former live-in girlfriend, Michelle Triola Marvin. The case, Mitchelson happily admits, is one “I’d been waiting for,” and it has already had wide repercussions.
Though Michelle legally took Marvin’s last name, the two were never married. After meeting on the set of Ship of Fools in 1964, they embarked on a six-year relationship that ended in 1970, when Marvin moved out and married Pamela Feeley, his high school sweetheart. Michelle, now 46, says that when she and Marvin split, he began paying her a stipend of $800 a month. But Marvin, 54, cut her off after a year, and she went to Mitchelson. He filed suit on her behalf, demanding full payment of what Michelle said Lee had promised her: 50% of the $3.6 million that Marvin accumulated mostly from movies, including Cat Ballou and The Dirty Dozen, while they were living together.
Two California lower courts rejected the suit, ruling that such agreements are not enforceable if the relationship is “meretricious,” in other words money for sex. In fact, the first judge got up and left the bench while Mitchelson was still making his case. Mitchelson announced that he was delighted; now he could make new law for the whole state by taking his case to higher courts on appeal.
He succeeded. In December 1976 the state supreme court decided that Michelle did indeed have the right to sue. Noting “radically” changed social mores “in regard to cohabitation,” it ruled that the law should not “impose a standard based on alleged moral considerations that have apparently been so widely abandoned by so many.” As long as sex was not the basis of the agreement, said the court, unmarried couples could expressly agree to share their property or even imply such an agreement by their conduct toward each other.
At the trial, Mitchelson will attempt to emphasize that the Marvin-Triola relationship was a marriage in all but name. He will argue that Michelle agreed to give up a promising singing career to care for Marvin in return for half of his earnings. His brief never mentions the bedroom but rather speaks in terms of “housekeeper, cook, confidante” and “joint bank accounts.”
Mitchelson is no lectern pounder; even attorneys who have opposed him concede that he is unfailingly “pleasant and easygoing.” Clients who visit him in his office are sometimes surprised to find him dressed in a bathrobe or riding britches, conducting an imaginary orchestra as a hi-fi system plays a favorite Verdi opera. He is also a Shakespeare buff who once spent an afternoon trading quotes from the Bard with Marlon Brando as the two worked out a custody settlement over Brando’s child.
But in court, he makes the most of what he describes as a talent for being “emotionally logical.” In custody cases, he has been known to weep before a jury, out of what he asserts is “genuine concern for the parent who is feeling pain.” As for the Marvin case, he describes it sanctimoniously as a quest “to permit unmarried women the dignity of walking through the front door of a courthouse” to seek “just and fair treatment.”
If Michelle wins, her gray-haired, boyish-looking attorney stands to earn as much as $500,000 for his efforts. Grateful divorcees have been known to reward Mitchelson well: in one 1974 case that was worth $13 million to his client, Mitchelson got a fee of $1.25 million. The son of a schoolteacher and a building contractor, Mitchelson won a football scholarship to the University of Oregon, got his legal training at Southwestern University Law School in Los Angeles, and started out specializing in criminal and personal injury cases. He first gained attention in 1963 by winning a major right-to-counsel case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Mitchelson’s fame as a divorce lawyer—and his reputation as a “bomber” who can turn a marital split-up into an expensive war—dates from 1964, when he won a $2 million settlement for Actor James Mason’s ex-wife Pamela. That case, settled before Mitchelson could call his 43 witnesses and extract lurid testimony about the Mason marriage, established Mitchelson’s style: the messier the case he could prepare, the bigger the settlement. Says Mitchelson with a smile: “These were the weapons of the system,” Since California adopted no-fault divorce in 1969, such weapons have been largely set aside.
The reverberations from Mitchelson’s latest case are already broad. As many as 1,000 Marvin vs. Marvin-style suits have been filed in the California courts alone. The case has stirred so much litigation that one San Francisco divorce lawyer now likes to call living together “marvinizing.” Actress Britt Ekland had sued Singer Rod Stewart for a partnership interest in his earnings, estimated at $5 million, for the two years they lived together but settled last year for attorneys’ fees, a house and some cash. Mitchelson, who has been called “the paladin of paramours,” has been signed up by the ex-girlfriends of Rock Star Alice Cooper and Actor Nick Nolle to sue their former roommates for $3.5 million plus $90,000 annually and for $5 million, respectively.
The Marvin argument will surely spread beyond California’s tolerant borders. Laws against fornication or cohabitation in some states will be an obstacle, and Georgia courts have already considered and rejected a Marvin-type case. But appellate courts in six other states (Oregon, Minnesota, Washington, Illinois, Connecticut and Michigan) have recognized that there can be contractual obligations between live-in couples.
Ironically, if common-law marriage had not been abolished in California in 1895 (and ultimately by most states), the Marvin case might not have been necessary. And even before the Marvin decision, a few states accepted clear-cut, express agreements to share between unmarried partners. But California was the first to go as far as to say that just living together might imply a contract. This is what worries many lawyers. Says Los Angeles Attorney Arthur Crowley, another top California divorce lawyer: “You’re almost giving someone the power of legal blackmail,” a power that is most likely to be used against people who are in the public eye. Responds Mitchelson, who has been married for 18 years: “I believe a woman who has lived as a wife with everything but an $8 marriage license should have the same rights.”
The case could conceivably be extended to all sorts of other combinations: homosexuals in California have already begun suing under Marvin, unmarried fathers would have a claim to child custody, and who knows what courts would do with a ménage à trois. “Don’t you love all the ramifications?” asks Mitchelson. Lawyers certainly do. If nothing else Marvin surely means more lawsuits.
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